Wilson Collection: Sarah E. Edmonds

(Illustrations and title page from 1865 from Sarah Emma Edmonds' Civil War memoirs)

Under construction.

Sarah E. Edmonds

During the Civil War, Sarah Edmonds crisscrossed Confederate and gender lines. She enlisted in the Union Army as Frank Thompson, a nurse. And, as a Northern spy, she masqueraded as Charles, a Southern sympathizer, and as Cuff, a male slave.[1][2]

Edmonds married a man. But she recounted a time when, passing as a “famous” male bookseller, she “came near marrying a pretty little girl who found that I should not leave Nova Scotia without her.”[3] Later, she was pigeonholed by census takers. Of them, she remarked, “[A]nd then—well, you know how the census takers sum up all our employments with the too easily written words, ‘married woman.’ That is what I became.”[4]

References 1. “Sarah Edmonds,” National Park Service, accessed October 19, 2012, http://www.nps.gov/resources/person.htm?id=169. 2. S. Emma E. Edmonds, The Female Spy of the Union Army. The Thrilling Adventures, Experiences, and Escapes of a Woman, as Nurse, Spy, and Scout, in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-Fields (Boston: DeWolfe, Fiske, and Co., Publishers, n.d.), 107, accessed October 19, 2012, http://books.google.com/books?id=z7gZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA6&lpg=PA6&dq=purest+motives+and+most+praiseworthy+union+spy&source=bl&ots=BbpGZwMLjR&sig=NZeqVdeLI0TycJiY6Esb5hMq-wk&hl=en&ei=v6C2TuOcM8Xq0gHk-Zy_BA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCAQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false. 3. Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary: In Which Is Contained… (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1983), 194. 4. Ibid.